Colloquium Archive
Marjorie Curry Woods
Name:Marjorie Curry Woods, University of Texas at Austin
Presentation Title: "Premodern Teaching Methods in the Postmodern Classroom: Prolegomena to a Textbook"
Date: February 16, 2006
Abstract
I'll be approaching this subject from several perspectives: what kinds of teaching methods were used throughout the premodern period to teach what we call literature and composition; which ones were particular to various periods and the possible reasons for the differences; and what techniques that they developed and relied on might be helpful in our own literature and composition classrooms and why. I'll address some of the differences between group and individual learning experiences (related to the historical and critical debate about orality and literacy), pleasure in the classroom, and the uses and abuses of historical perspective and cliches about students' (not) learning.